Hummingbird Salamander(81)

He was already diving into the river as the deck exploded around him. He was already being carried downriver, surrounded by hot embers and burning shards of wood. I saw his head bob to the surface, go under, as he tried to right himself. But the river was too swift. He went under again.

By the time he washed up somewhere, alive or dead, I’d be long gone.





THE FARM





[86]


What folly, by a different name. The blaze. The way I saw it entire because I had created it. How it enclosed the world. No light upon the water not forced there. No sound not inflicted. No heat. Oh, the heat. The light. Everything Silvina hated. I was sure of that. The way the edges of the water winced away from the aftershocks. The way holes appeared symptomatic, like reverse miracles, in the tree trunks lining the riverbank.

A haze to the sky that took over, that overtook me. What better way to give away my location to the world? I’d never thought it would work. But the instructions online had been simple and clear.

I loaded up the car with my supplies. By then it was dusk, and the neighbor’s place was a smoldering, damp wreck. It didn’t take much imagination to realize my neighbor’s blackened body lay somewhere in the wreckage. Langer would’ve had to strangle him to make him quiet. Which told me more about what he, or his ghost, was capable of. And what I was capable of. Maybe even capable of whatever Silvina might want from me. I had plenty of explosives left.

I felt more at peace than in a long time. So much I didn’t know, and the stress of my destination, but at least I knew where to go. No doubt about that.

Idly, without much interest: wondered whether my father was still alive. I assumed not, but I hadn’t bothered to check, the past twenty years.

When I’d finished packing, I drove fifty feet down the driveway, stopped, got out to take one last look at my sanctuary. The place where I’d hidden from the world. The place I’d tried to use to cast off my destiny.

I’d left Silvina’s journal on the kitchen table and Furtown stabbed to the floor. I didn’t need them anymore, for different reasons.

I pushed another button and blew the place to hell.





[87]


Things I could never know. The list kept adding up, as I drove down dirt roads, down roads with no names, heavily rutted. As I let Nora’s car take punishment normally meted out to pickup trucks. The rain wouldn’t stop, and turned to sleet or snow as bands of cold and warmer air battled. I had protein bars and bottled water. I could go to the bathroom roadside; I wasn’t shy. Anymore. Stopped for gas and directions, and that was all. Cut the engine, along a grassy embankment, a graffiti-lined concrete berm, along a deep forest road, when I was tired and couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The air often smelled electric, almost chemical, and maybe the green-gray would never go away. Maybe we wouldn’t even notice it, after a while. Maybe we wouldn’t remember it had been different, until the next thing that happened to us. Until it killed us.

Something fundamental had shifted in the world. Or maybe just in my perception of it. I had to keep the radio on to stay awake, but only to music, because the news seemed like fiction. Sermons and apocalyptic threats from talk shows were no better than news. The thought that maybe even Vilcapampa Senior, from some golden mansion, might one day hide in fear from the future.

As water lashed the car windows, as the wipers struggled to keep up, as more than once I went slow and almost floated off half-flooded bridges, I tried to make sense in my head of what I did know.

Fusk loomed like some sort of original sin. The fact that Ronnie had commissioned the taxidermy. Ronnie and Hillman (I balked at Roger) as siblings, divided in their intent and purpose. That Langer, existing for me in a purgatory, dead alive, had such a fixation on Silvina, after their affair. That he had felt risking the remnants of Contila and killing people meant he was protecting her. He didn’t need answers. He had them already. All of them lost in a maze, or web, of Silvina’s making, or just in the idea of a cause greater than themselves.

A moment, I was convinced. There had been a moment when Langer, Hellmouth, and Silvina had been aligned in a very personal way. Not just one run by the other. Not just one sleeping with the other. Maybe it had been on a Miami beach somewhere, summoned by Hellmouth. Or in Argentina. But it had been the kind of experience that made you bond. Or made you think you were part of something greater. I couldn’t see the anger and the passion in him now as just betrayal. I couldn’t imagine Silvina with him without seeing some sort of understanding with Hellmouth. And then it was gone and they fell out of each other’s orbits and yet they remained … entangled. Couldn’t quite ever become unstuck again.

What I couldn’t tell for certain was Hellmouth’s position within that maze. Or did he exist outside of it entire somehow? The magician. The fool. Who had miscalculated in this sense: that Langer’s entanglement, his engagement, was absolute. That Langer could have been emotionally hurt by Hellmouth’s betrayal. Wide and deep yet claustrophobic and small.

All of them had been involved, in some sense, in wildlife trafficking, even Silvina. Vilcapampa Senior lured back into that or jumping in headfirst? Langer had said it plain, that Contila hardly existed anymore. Almost as if Contila had always been part ghost, and not because of Hellmouth’s localized predations.

What was Hellmouth protecting or obscuring? What did he want? Or did he want nothing, but, like some windup automaton on a track, kept completing the same loop?